Philipp Weiss

The Austrian writer Philipp Weiss was born in Vienna in 1982. He writes prose and plays. His studies of people and conditions, German literature, philosophy and German as a Foreign Language took him to the universities of Vienna and Barcelona. After a year of working with handicapped people in 2008, he worked as a lecturer for German literature at the University of Baku in Azerbaijan.

His works have been published by notable literary journals as well as by publishing houses like Residenz Verlag, Walter de Gruyter (about Peter Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, 2009) Passagen Verlag (egon. Ein Kunst-Stück, 2008) and Edition Atelier (Tartaglia, 2013). He has received various awards, inter alia the Hermann Lenz Fellowship in 2006, the 3. Litarena Literature Prize in 2007, the Austrian State Scholarship for Literature 2008/2009, the Austrian playwright scholarship in 2011 and 2012, the Theodor Körner Prize in 2013 and was nominated for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2009. With his play “Seifenblasenoper. Eine Kritik der runden Vernunft” (Soap Bubble Opera. Critique of Round Reason) he was invited to the Young Playwright Workshop of the Viennese Burgtheater, with “Allerwelt” (All men’s world) he won the Hans Gratzer scholarship at the Schauspielhaus Vienna 2011, where he will be writer in residence for the season 2013/14.

Philipp Weiss's works are characterized by linguistic virtuosity and extraordinary concepts, which are always spotted on the edge of the impossible.

In the last years his works deal with the intersections of the small space of privacy and intimacy with the big picture of the global condition. The subjects of his latest works are migration, global economy, marginalization, exclusion, and the question of the human future.